The roots of English

Iain "Mosh" Purdie - WINOLJ but is syndicated somewhere, but %^*ing LJ now won't let me view my own list of friends - asked me to comment on his blog post here where ( he asked 'Anyone got any ideas where these to-ings and fro-ings come from?'... )

The snag is, the answer won't fit, so here it is...

The thing is, sometimes the origins of a word get obscured. Everyone knows that English is an Indoeuropean language, for instance, but how few know what that means? About as many as know that Finnish is a Finno-Ugric one from the Uralic group.

English is a hybrid. It comes from several roots. Englisc - Old English - was the language of the Angles, descendants of the Saxon invaders; their tongue was a Saxon one, related to low German, especially Frisian. It's mixed a little with the Celtic languages previously spoken before the Saxons got here and took over; the people who today speak a language related to the real original language of Britain are the Welsh.

Hints in names: Surrey <= Sud rige, the South Reich, the "southern empire" or "southern reach". (Reich and Reach come from the same root). Essex <= East Sax(ons). Sussex <= South Sax(ons), Wessex <= West Sax(ons), and so on.

Then the Normans invaded and Old English got a big injection of Norman French, leading to our dual words for things: the animals are "swine", from the same root as "schwein" in modern Hochdeutsch, but their meat is "pork" from "porc". These examples are well known, but in German or Norwegian, the meat is just "swine flesh".

So our language has dual roots from 2 branches of the Indoeuropean tree: one from the Teutonic languages (modern relatives German, Dutch, Norwegian/Danish/Swedish, Icelandic) and one from the Romance group (the descendants of Latin: modern relatives French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanain, Rumantsh)

Often now, a millennium after we suddenly got a French king and court, the (often longer) romance word has overtones of authority while the (often shorter) Saxon one is direct and informal: "demand" vs. "ask", "problem" V "bother", "oppose" V "against". There are hundreds of examples; mostly we're not aware of them.

Your example "window" is nothing to do with "fenester", directly. It's a Norse kenning, a pun: it means "wind eye", the eye that the wind used to see into your house. Windr auge became "window" in English, "vindu" in Norse. But "wind" probably shares a root with "vent", and "wind" in modern French is "vent": the shared root there is long before Latin or Teutonic and goes straight back to Indoeuropean.

Some useful tools: [1] get a proper web browser, like Firefox, with keyword searches. :¬) Then [2] look up the roots of words on the online dictionary by typing "dict window" as an address. You get this:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=window

To see some of the differences between Saxon and Norman words in modern English, look up Anglish, an artificial dialect of English which uses exclusively Saxon roots wherever possible. In Firefox, type "wp anglish" to get the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglish

Also go read Poul Anderson's wonderful "Uncleftish Beholding", which is - as the title says - Atomic Theory in Anglish. ("A-tom" = "no cut" in Greek, which becomes "un cleft" in Anglish. "Atomic", pertaining to atoms, becomes "uncleftish". "Beholding", an understanding of an idea - a theory.)
( Read an extract. )

It's a wonderful piece by a great master of our language, and once you read it, you for the first time comprehend what "oxy-gen" means. "Sour stuff". Pure brilliance. Anglish is also known as "Ander saxon", a modern kenning - it's a pun by Doug Hofstadter. ("Ander" from Anderson, but also from the Saxon root meaning "other".)

In summary: to understand why English words as as they are, you need to look at their synonyms; you'll often readily be able to find one latinate word and one teutonic one. In this way, English is rich: if you're thinking in French or German, you only get one word; we have 3, 4, 5 or more. French "chaud": warm or hot. English: 2 words, "warm" and "hot", plus blazing, blistering, boiling, burning, incandescent, searing, sizzling, torrid and many more. English is big: probably the biggest language on Earth with something like a one million words.

Uncleftish Beholding

Since it seems somewhat hard to find in its entirety, here is Poul Anderson's essay on atomic theory in Anglish. I present...

Uncleftish Beholding

(reprinted from the revised edition appearing in his collection All One Universe.)

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

The underlying kinds of stuff are the firststuffs, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mightily small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.
( Read more... )

Anglish as an insight into other tongues

Maybe it's just me, but a thought occurs to me. Consider the contrast between Anglish, as in Uncleftish Beholding, and standard English. When one tries to read Anglish, all the little words are familiar, by and large, barring a few which are obscure or archaic, but which one can guess or work out. However, one becomes lost when looking at the longer words: they are not our language, one has to mentally deduce what they mean and substitute meaningful equivalents. I needed to consult a periodic table much past "stonestuff". :¬)

I wonder if this is what it is like for, say, a speaker of Urdu encountering Hindustani, or vice versa. The underlying language is the same, but Urdu draws on Persian (AKA Farsi or Parsi - the language of the Pharisees, you see) and Arabic vocabulary and is written in Arabic, whereas the Hindi form, Hindustani, draws on Sanskrit vocabulary and is written in Devanagari. Hearing it, you recognise the little words, but the big nouns and adjectives wash over you, nearly but not quite understood.

I don't know, directly; I speak no urdu, hindi or anything like it myself. It was, though, interesting to meet and talk to Ritesh, a colleague of kjersti's in Oslo. As I've never been to India, he's the only Indian I've ever spoken with who has little or no "contamination" with English. He found is fascinating to draw me out and discover all the hindi words I knew that I didn't realise I knew - sure, we all know khaki, bungalow, shampoo, stuff like that, but I also am familiar with channa, tarka, dhaal, naan, puri, ghosht, bindi and bhindi, aloo, muttar, gobi, paneer, saag and many more. :¬) It might be different if I wasn't so fond of curry, of course...